Worldbuilding Wednesday #9: Communication (Patreon)

The earliest forms of long-distance communication on Flora were about what you'd expect, crude mail and courier systems that were slow, inconvenient, and unreliable. Many major conflicts began because of a slight miscommunication that couldn't be cleared up, as they often do. Magic was not well understood at this time, and very few species, such as the bats, had the ability to naturally infuse it into their messages, giving them a major edge over their competing cultures. 

It wasn't until the rise of the Mothers of Magic that the first major communications network was established through Madama Silvana's power to freely move throughout space. Not only could she herself travel and transport others over long distances, she could infuse her magic into Spacial Tickets of her sister Mystana's design, that would allow others to cast teleportation magic on her level. There were few scholars the Mothers of Magic trusted with these tickets, as their power could be abused in very obvious ways, and one major incident occurred that limited their use almost entirely. Regardless, this ability to communicate instantaneously meant that theories and discoveries that used to take months to travel could now be done in hours.

As Silvana was only one woman and could only do so much to facillitate communication manually, she and a small group of witches specializing in frequency studies began setting up a proper network in major information hubs, and experimented with sending sound waves over long-distances. Silvana and the other Mothers would vanish from the public eye during its development, but the groundwork was already set in place for a global transmission system, known as ECHO. The system heavily favored the magic-saavy, and at the very least, required a user to know how to astral project themselves. The astral projection would enter a transmitter with a small portal tuned to a large nexus, where an operator would then redirect them to their intended recipient's receiving portal. Additionally, both parties could project into a shared, secure magical space set up in advance.

ECHO itself was mostly rendered obsolute once less intrusive, simpler audiovisual communication systems were developed, but it is still sometimes used in covert operations due to the difficulty in detecting and intercepting it, since it uses tiny physical portals instead of any sort of airborne wave or signal. We see Friedrich use it during his intermission story, with a stealth receiver disguised as a pin and cushion.

As centuries passed by, the concepts involved in communication networks became more complex, eventually culminating in the Echosphere, a vast pocket space where millions of networks physically exist as magical constructs. But that'll be the topic for next week, when we (for real, this time) discuss the internet as Flora knows it.